Shell Block - The turtle hides in his shell at low health, gaining immunity to all damage. While in this state, the turtle can be kicked across the room by players, applying Shell Concussion to any creatures it hits along the way.

Shell Concussion - When kicked, the shell spins forward, interrupting enemies it touches and leaving them off-balance, increasing the damage they take from all sources by 15% for 30 sec.

Drain the Weak - Drains health when attacking targets with less than 350,000 current health, inflicting 20% of weapon damage as Physical and healing the caster for 50 times the damage dealt.

Crystal Shell - The crystal reacts when struck, encasing the attacker in a shell that absorbs all incoming damage and healing. Initially the shell will absorb up to 100,000 damage, but healing absorbed by the shell is added to this total, up to a maximum of 500,000. The shell breaks when it cannot absorb any more damage.

Nana Mudclaw has realized she is getting on in years and is looking for someone to take over the Tiller's Union. She asks you to see if Farmer Yoon is willing to take over, which he is! This results in him giving Sunsong Ranch to you for free.

Farmer Yoon says: Nana Mudclaw asked ME to join the Tillers council?
Farmer Yoon says: Just think of all the knowledge I could share. Think of all the food we could grow!
Farmer Yoon says: But... I don't think I'll have time to work for the council, AND run Sunsong Ranch.
Farmer Yoon says: This farm has been in my family for generations. How can I give it up? Yet, a greater responsibility has fallen upon me.
Farmer Yoon says: There's only one solution. I have to join the council. As for the farm...
Farmer Yoon says: Chaudmmoc, I'm gifting Sunsong Ranch to you. You're in charge, now!
Farmer Yoon says: I'd better head up and talk to Nana. The farm is yours now, Chaudmmoc. I know you'll take great care of it.

Merchant Greenfield also has received some upgrades, as he now sells bags of seeds that let you plant four patches at once. Each bag costs as much as 30 seeds and has 10 charges, allowing you to plant 40 seeds. Should you already have many seeds in your bags, his new assistant Milly Greenfield will exchange 30 seeds for a bag of seeds.

The patch notes also mention that the yield from special crops has been improved to make farming them competitive with gathering these items out in the world. It isn't clear if this is active yet from limited testing, but so far the maximum number of items rewarded from the special seeds doesn't appear to be increased. The patch notes also mention that the farm will become an inn once you own it, but that doesn't appear to work yet on the PTR.

Rated Battleground Suspension Update

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Earlier this week, several player accounts were given short suspensions and had their ratings wiped for being involved in Rated Battleground win-trading. Upon further review, we determined that some of the players initially identified as cheating may not have purposefully participated in the exploitive behavior, and as a result, we're in the process of lifting suspensions and restoring ratings to all but the most egregious offenders. This process should be completed following the Tuesday maintenance.

As always, our goal is to identify cheaters while making sure people playing by the rules aren't inadvertently penalized. Rest assured that we'll continue to take action against players who aren't competing in the spirit of fair play.

PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Thing is, and this is what is puzzling GC with the whole hitbox situation.. is that we're getting out of range errors, yet our white swings are still merrily hitting the target. It's that disparity that confuses the kitties. I've never seen that kind of issue on any other melee class.
White attacks and yellow attacks are calculated differently by the engine and it make different calculations about your position. You have to remember WoW was originally designed to be mostly white attacks with very few yellow attacks. The 2013 game is a very different beast, and if we could do it all over again, we'd have the two handled really similarly. Again, this isn't anything related to druids or cats. Despite your personal experience, all melee should be encountering this.

Spirit Shell formula is slightly off - right now the metagem critical effect (1.03) is only being multiplied in on the expected aegis size on crits not on the entire crit heal. This is causing a slight decrease in the size of SS.
You are correct. Fixed.

I doubt this is even close to enough to make an rbg team want to bring a ret.
We have a problem right now where melee of all kinds are not very attractive for super-competitive RBG teams, except possibly as a flag carrier, in which case you probably want a druid or warrior. This isn’t the kind of thing we’re going to easily solve by just throwing all sorts of amazing utility at every melee spec, but we agree it’s a problem and we’re looking at longer term solutions.

It was stated abilities are meant to be counterable, but things like Cloak of Shadows and smokebomb are just fine. There is a double standard here.....
Quoting Ghostcrawler because he said it better than I could: "Yes, all of those mechanics still exist, though we are trying to design as many as possible out of the game. We're much more likely to consider tools that have a counter, not tools that cannot be countered."

Eye for an eye baseline would be kinda cool, but it'll have to be designed really well because I don't want it breaking CCs lol. I would probably rather have something else if I had to choose though.
Something we hear a lot from Retribution is they want a little more “retribution” back in their kit. We don’t think passive and/or random reflection like Eye for an Eye or Retribution Aura were super interesting mechanics but we understand the attraction of the idea in general and we’ll consider something longer term.

Reduce PW:S mana cost (this is gonna have to happen one way or another to make it viable), and make it so that a priest can't have more than 3 - 4 active PW:S to avoid PWS spam.
This suggestion (limit 3 or whatever) has come up a few times, and possibly for other traditionally-hard-to-balance spells like Eternal Flame and perhaps Rejuvenation. We are unlikely to make any of these changes for 5.2 so it’s probably beyond the scope of discussion in this thread, but we wouldn’t mind hearing more feedback on the idea over the long term. I personally worry that it might feel like a lot to have to track, which makes mods more mandatory, etc.

Looks like they need to just go ahead and buff Arms rage generation.
We’re hearing really mixed feedback on Arms’ rage at the moment and I suspect there is still a lot of experimentation and/or theorycrafting required to figure out when to use Overpower vs. Slam vs. Heroic Strike. (To be clear, we have a design, but we're not sure it's working yet.) Warriors nearly always ask for more, more, more rage, so just seeing posts requesting the same won’t be sufficient to convince us. Overall though, more analysis of how Arms rotation feels (in PvE and PvP) would be helpful.

This post is from the perspective of an Elemental Shaman that mainly focuses on PvP.
You commented on a lot of different things, which makes it hard for me to offer responses. (In general players tend to try to cover too many different topics in a single post instead of focusing on the 2-3 that really, really matter). I will try to cover a few though.

While it’s fun to have lots of minor glyphs, they really are targeted at fun, and this thread is supposed to be about the nuts and bolts of rotations and set bonuses, so it’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

We agree Elemental have too many mandatory glyphs, and we did give you the most mandatory one (Flame Shock) as a base mechanic in 5.2.

I disagree with you some on Frozen Power. We see a lot of Elemental shaman using it. It’s not the dominant talent (Earthgrab is) but it definitely isn’t niche.

I also disagree with you on the prevalence of dispels. Dispels are precious in MoP. I know it might seem like anything awesome you do gets instantly removed, but your opponent has to make the choice to blow their CD on your Flame Shock (which has a lower CD than the dispel). We are really trying to move away from undispellable mechanics on enemies. In Cataclysm and before, dispels weren't a choice and we agree that anything got removed too quickly. We're not really in that world anymore, and we think that's a huge improvement.

I keep getting a lot of lols on Twitter about Shamanistic Rage, but we think this is a pretty serious buff for Elemental in PvP (esp. considering the glyph). It’s an exciting change. We’ll see if we’re right.

Does that not seem odd to you? Where are your design principles? Where is the consistency?
Hardly any PvP paladin takes Light’s Hammer, while it’s reasonably popular in PvE. A PvP-only buff there makes a lot of sense. Nearly every priest takes Phantasm in PvP while it’s not popular in PvE. A PvP-only nerf makes sense there.

I'm glad for warriors that you decided to revert the additional nerfs to Second Wind, but there is still a potential problem with it and that tier. The problem is that it's mandatory for warriors to take because it is so necessary for their viability.
We actually agree with this, but allow me to explain our logic. As a designer, one of the things you often have to struggle with is idealistic design vs. realistic design. In a pure design space, we believe Enraged Regen and Impending Victory are balanced and Second Wind is overpowered. However, we’re not talking about a theoretical game. It’s a real, living game played by millions of players. Our changes have impact. Arms warriors (and Frost mages and a couple of other specs) have been hammered with PvP nerfs since launch, and not at all because the players did anything wrong. The new patch brings a few more hefty Arms nerfs with Shockwave, Defensive Stance, Overpower, Taste for Blood and Warbringer. We’re not trying to kill Arms in PvP and we’re not trying to make anyone who plays Arms hopelessly depressed. In this case we think it’s acceptable to have Second Wind be a little overpowered so long as Arms as a whole is not dramatically overpowered or underpowered. Long term, it’s the kind of thing we’d like to eventually fix, but in the short term, we think nerfing it does more harm than good.

just curious, what are you looking at that makes you think shadow priests are OP in pvp? It seems that we get more nerfs based on a projection of what you might think is the case, then classes that were/are OP. What about shadow makes you think it's over powered? I still feel like I get focused every game I play, and you nerfing my escape tool kit, when I don't ever see how priests had superior escapes.
There’s always an element of that in PvP. For PvE, we have a really good idea of how much damage everyone can do in every situation. That’s harder to generate for PvP and not even super relevant. We do look at who is winning a lot in PvP. We do it a lot ourselves to try and understand why. We also try to pay a lot of attention to player feedback, especially those skilled PvP players whose opinions we respect, but also the guy just doing pickup BGs who still deserves to have fun. In all of those cases, the names that keep coming up are Frost, Arms, Shadow and maybe BM.

Frost and Arms are taking some big nerfs. BM has a couple of little ones. With Shadow, I’ve tried to be honest that we’re not exactly sure of the right thing to hit. There isn’t anything there like Shockwave or PoM+Ring of Frost that feels totally broken. It’s a lot of little things that add up: damage, healing, utility, survivability. Utility we really don't want to hit and damage isn't too high in PvE. At the moment, we've nerfed burst a little, healing a little, and made some of the survivability mechanics less potent. We'll see how that feels.

Are you telling me that not only is this issue understood, but is considered acceptable? Being spammed with out of range while you're clipping someone elses model is incredibly frustrating and a major turn off to playing the game at all. It swings both ways too, being stunned by a melee ability from someone 20yds away is just awesome. I had hoped something would eventually be done to fix this crap.
Which would be acceptable? That the nose of the cat is considered the center of the model, so that anyone chasing you has to hit your nose? Or that cats just have a huge combat reach (which also means everyone else can hit you much easier than they could a smaller model)? Should tauren for that matter be easier to hit and gnomes harder? Trust me that this is a very old and involved debate in game design – the code does not always agree with the art about where your character is located, and that is particularly true on a client-server game that still tries to offer some semblance of snappy combat.

1. Are you happy with how many different categories there are?
2. Are you happy that some abilities affect more than one DR category?
3. Are you happy CC is so complicated, that not even sites like Arena Junkies can track how they all interact?
4. If you are not happy, would you please please please consider reworking CC and DR and make it transparent in the tool tips?
Our sense is that there probably 2-3 too many different categories. I also totally agree that the system is way too opaque, especially for new players. Mentioning DR and perhaps PvP CC durations in the tooltips (perhaps only in PvP, perhaps only as an advanced option) is something we’ve wanted to do for some time (so is Path of the Titans, so is Dance Studio… you know how it goes).

We also talk often about whether the game would be better off with only a single DR category. It makes it easier to learn for sure. But it’s also a really risky change. Much of the depth of PvP skill involves knowing what ability DRs with what. A lot of Arena comps are built on that mechanic. It gives us a lot of room to provide surgical buffs or nerfs by changing which DRs with what. Overall, I think there is a chance we would scale down the number of different DRs, but it’s a small chance. We’re much more likely to just spell them out more explicitly (which to be fair also chips away at the knowledge base that differentiates an expert PvP player from a merely tolerable one).

That's what I'm trying to say in more attention grabbing ways. I can try running the numbers in simcraft or wrathcalcs if that will help, but I'm not the math expert that some of the silent laser chickens are.
Nope, you did a fine job. It will take us some time to analyze all this, but I wanted to drop a quick note to say we appreciate the work.

Now moving into patch 5.2 We'll have a similar feel except we'll have a lot of GCDs where we can't do anything because we've blown our rage on AOE. We'll proably go... Mortal Strike > Thunderclap > Whirwlind > Twiddle our thumbs for 3 seconds while we wait for MS to come off CD. We don't have that filler of Overpower to do something else whilel we wait.
This could be a problem. We’ll look into it more. Off the cuff, we could make Whirlwind 20 rage (just for Arms!) to keep parity with the cheaper Slam.

MAKE SEPARATE TALENTS FOR PVE AND PVP!!!!
I’ll refrain from the caps, but we do that all the time. Check out Colossus Smash. Check out (live) Taste for Blood. Check out the duration on Polymorph. We do it as a last resort, because it does cause more risk for bugs and is more for players to have to remember, but when it’s the right solution, we definitely go there. We nerfed Devouring Plague’s up front damage because that reduces PvP burst without having a huge impact on PvE (because the difference in burst in this case is over such a short time frame it’s unlikely to really be felt). If that solution hadn’t worked, then we could have considered DP to do less damage in PvP.

I'll also posit that even if PvE and PvP had totally different rule sets, it wouldn't reduce the volume of players campaigning for buffs or nerfs. "Everyone" would still think it was their class holding them back and would want us to twiddle with the numbers even more. Once in awhile we'll say something like "We'd love to help you guys, but we just can't buff you any more because of PvE / PvP." The more typical situation is that someone thinks they need a buff while we disagree. Splitting out the rules doesn't change that.

Perhaps there is a much simpler solution (a numbers tweak rather than a mechanics tweak)?
I feel like we’d have to nerf Divine Aegis dramatically to have the same effect. The Spirit Shell change was mostly so priests could go back to using it at the right moment and not just on cooldown because it was a throughput increase. Those are the two major changes that weren’t numbers tweaks.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Patch 5.2 Faction Rep and Valor Gear
The raid rep (and their delicious, delicious Valor epics) includes LFR. You will need to kill bosses though to keep progressing it. No more ICC trash rep runs.

I never found it to be bad, just boring as hell to go clear trash for hours on end to cheese the rep earning mechanic.
Yeah, but then we'd probably want to balance rep gain speed with the assumption that you're chain-running trash, which makes people who don't do it (but are raiding and killing bosses) slower at getting access to those items. That doesn't really make much sense, mechanically or in the kind of in-world sense of "impressing" a group of people with your accomplishments.

"Huzzah! The hero hath once again slain many inconsequential foes, to leap through thine magic portal, and oft returneth to... doeth the same task over and again! Verily, this is a champion worthy of our shiny baubles and trinkets."

So, regular raiders will still be running LFR whether they want to or not to min max their rep. Or can you guys do something creative like killing x boss on ANY difficulty gives rep once per week, period?
Yes, you gain rep from boss kills once per week regardless of difficulty.

This reminds me of dailies.
Sure, you can loosely apply that to any task with some variance of repetition. Feel free. Except that continuing to fight to take back areas, or retrieve items, or slay ne'er-do-wells generally makes some sense in the context of the narrative in daily hubs. Those damn monkeys stoled muh fruits again! Etc. etc.

Going into a raid and not killing bosses does not.

So here's a question, why have valor gear gated behind rep at all? I definitely see it as a step in the right direction having valor gated behind raids instead of dailies. But it's still a double-tax. You earn valor points, but in order to spend said points, you need to earn rep on top of it.
The whole point of a steady and measured currency to buy items is to offset the RNG of boss loot drops. If you're unlucky you still have this absolute system, and no matter what, you know that in X time you can fill in at least a few of those gaps. The intent of these currencies wasn't as a type of separate loot progression, but that is the way a lot of people perceive it, and certainly some of our designs have even worked to support that perception. The whole original intent in mind though it makes more sense to ensure that you're killing bosses to be able to buy Valor items, and not just farming up Valor from other sources. Of course we could take Valor out of everything but raid kills/completions to avoid that... but Valor is a nice reward to have in a lot of various systems, and lets people pick and choose the ways they want to earn it.

I don't want to imply though that having Valor items on daily quests was in any way a failed experiment. Obviously some of you weren't too keen on having the items behind those reps, and so in 5.2 we're trying this. We may have some mix in the future, we may not, let us know how you think it feels when the patch is live and if the new daily hub is compelling enough to gain your attention without a meatier (ie ilvl based) reward.

If it is.. will a person get enough rep from just three wings of LFR to be able to buy something to avoid running into the 3000 point valor cap?
Yup, we'll make sure items are paced out to hopefully avoid that. Getting to Friendly is pretty quick, and there are items available at all reputation levels. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

LFR Difficulty and PurposeNew players discover what the basic principles of raiding are.
Raid Finder is not an introductory tool for raiding. It's aimed to players that can't participate in organized raiding (or don't wish to) for whatever reason.

Players don't see the entire raids of a new patch in less then 2 hours, but instead they get a feel for how the new raid feels and what it looks like, and incase they want to discover the other part they are encouraged to join a raiding guild and really get into the game.
It's true that if you're a normal or heroic raider, it kinda sucks to go in and discover the whole place in just 2 hours. For 5.0.4 raids, Raid Finder was unlocked one week after the raid was released on normal mode.

Less gear; This is again an encouragement for players to join raiding guilds.
Which is exactly the opposite of what LFR is supposed to do. It should be a venue of character progression for those players. Arbitrarily punishing them so they join raids would defeat the purpose of it in the first place. The gear is already lower ilvl, and the other rewards from Raid Finder are lower as well.

More pugs: Players who can't join a raiding guild due to IRL would be encouraged to create a pug when they have the time for it
So, if we get rid of half the content from the Raid Finder, players are going to get into more pugs because we got rid of the abilty to conveniently get into pugs? Think about it, players who can't join a raiding guild probably can't schedule either their playtime with complete strangers.

Gearing up alts would be harder, as you can't receive full BIS LFR gear anymore.
BiS LFR gear? At this rate, I swear one day we'll see "BiS green gear" used as an argument to justify something... I'm not attacking your point though (especially for those that enjoy gearing up alts it'd be definitely a negative aspect). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The Daily Blink - Welcome, Duncan JonesThe Daily Blink has seen the future of the legendary quest line.

:| Is it just me who is waiting for the first funny Daily Blink-post?
Yes. I realise Americans seem to find it funny, but I just don't see it.

Lol you don't get it??? I am from Australia and I even get it, was very funny indeed one of DB"s better strips. Read what Wrathion says to the Blood Elf player about what they have to do to get their legendary.

Blizzard: "Shadow Priests don't have an OP mechanic like Shockwave or POM Ring of Frost"
Blizzard: "We don't really know where to nerf them in PvP"

Think about Barkskin -20% damage on a 60 sec cooldown. Now think about PW:Shield that has the same effect and can be spammed 3 times more often
Slow Active Healing spell: Healing Touch. Now think about Flash Heal that can be casted faster and heals the same amount
Lay on Hands is not allowed in arena for an obvious reason. Now think about Life Swap + Pillar Humping + Dispersion + Shield + Flash Heals
Think about any other hybrid and their dispell (Poisons and Curses). Now think about which category most of the CC and harmful debuffs are and then think about Mass Dispell.

Really Blizzard can't see where Shadow Priests are OP in PvP ?

On a side note, I really appreciate that blizz aknowledged Balance druids' problems in pvp, movement dps and low sustained damage because solar eclipse sucks....oh wait no they didn't. Another week has passed and it's once again the Week End !
Keep up the good work guys, we pay you for that nonetheless !

Lol you don't get it??? I am from Australia and I even get it, was very funny indeed one of DB"s better strips. Read what Wrathion says to the Blood Elf player about what they have to do to get their legendary.

So here's a question, why have valor gear gated behind rep at all? I definitely see it as a step in the right direction having valor gated behind raids instead of dailies. But it's still a double-tax. You earn valor points, but in order to spend said points, you need to earn rep on top of it.
The whole point of a steady and measured currency to buy items is to offset the RNG of boss loot drops. If you're unlucky you still have this absolute system, and no matter what, you know that in X time you can fill in at least a few of those gaps. The intent of these currencies wasn't as a type of separate loot progression, but that is the way a lot of people perceive it, and certainly some of our designs have even worked to support that perception. The whole original intent in mind though it makes more sense to ensure that you're killing bosses to be able to buy Valor items, and not just farming up Valor from other sources. Of course we could take Valor out of everything but raid kills/completions to avoid that... but Valor is a nice reward to have in a lot of various systems, and lets people pick and choose the ways they want to earn it.

I don't want to imply though that having Valor items on daily quests was in any way a failed experiment. Obviously some of you weren't too keen on having the items behind those reps, and so in 5.2 we're trying this. We may have some mix in the future, we may not, let us know how you think it feels when the patch is live and if the new daily hub is compelling enough to gain your attention without a meatier (ie ilvl based) reward.

Blizzard: "Shadow Priests don't have an OP mechanic like Shockwave or POM Ring of Frost"
Blizzard: "We don't really know where to nerf them in PvP"

Think about Barkskin -20% damage on a 60 sec cooldown. Now think about PW:Shield that has the same effect and can be spammed 3 times more often
Slow Active Healing spell: Healing Touch. Now think about Flash Heal that can be casted faster and heals the same amount
Lay on Hands is not allowed in arena for an obvious reason. Now think about Life Swap + Pillar Humping + Dispersion + Shield + Flash Heals
Think about any other hybrid and their dispell (Poisons and Curses). Now think about which category most of the CC and harmful debuffs are and then think about Mass Dispell.

Really Blizzard can't see where Shadow Priests are OP in PvP ?

On a side note, I really appreciate that blizz aknowledged Balance druids' problems in pvp, movement dps and low sustained damage because solar eclipse sucks....oh wait no they didn't. Another week has passed and it's once again the Week End !
Keep up the good work guys, we pay you for that nonetheless !

Healing Touch vs. Flash Heal- I'd like to know how in the world (15768 to 18324 (+ 164.2% of SpellPower))(Flash Heal) is the same amount as (18460 to 21800 (+ 186% of SpellPower))(Healing Touch). Oh, wait...They're not the same...

Lay on Hands vs. Life Swap- This one takes simple math to figure out. With LoH, you have 1 target at full health (A=1) and one taking all the burst, about to die, let's say at 10% (B=0.1). The Paladin pushes one button and both A and B are at full health (A=1)(B=1): (A+B=C) 1+1=2. With LS, you have one target at full health (A=1) and the second target being destroyed again to about 10% (B=0.1). When the Priest presses LS, they trade health percentages (A=0.1)(B=1): (A+B=C) 0.1+1=1.1. Again...Not the same... (I also love how you equated 8 seconds (Dispersion+2 GCD for Shield and LS) + Healing Cast times to a Pally hitting one button. lol)

All Other Dispels vs. MD- This one is actually the easiest to discredit. MD is the ONLY dispel mechanic that has a cast time attached to it. It's also in the Holy School of Magic meaning that if you successfully interrupt it, you lock out their healing spells.